REASONING
Seeking space to feel deeply...a resonance between the quiet, the rational and the unhinged.
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Here, there is no singular interest or type. Obsessions surface unknowingly, yet this flow aims to arrange disparate parts that typically exist in tension - what we thought wouldn't fit, wasn't possible, wouldn't make sense, or what we weren't ready for.
To get there, we need the time and care the work deserves.
Chicago x Oakland . jason@fjcampbell.com

Jason Campbell, working under the diminutive [ell], is an artist and spatial designer, leveraging archival processes, performance, spatial theory, and sculpture. With interest and training in architecture and photography, Campbell tends to spaces and materials marked by 'productive tensions,' the dualities and incongruent narratives in everyday life.
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Ongoing inquiries delve into: reconstructions of the post-colonial home through memory, photograph, and perspectival drawing technique – including works acquired by the Smithsonian NMAAHC digital archive; a 5-year research initiative that prioritized art production's spatial and operational condition via a co-opted commercial storefront space in San Francisco [ell.SF]; and the Society for Care and Maintenance, an organization and performance concerned with acts of care, self-conditioning, and the space of introspection - an ongoing project that is currently reimagining a 200lbs. shattered tempered car glass collection swept from the streets of Oakland, CA.
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Campbell has exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cincinnati, and is a 2024 Building Design + Construction 40 under 40 honoree. Jason has taught undergraduate and graduate advanced option studios at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, where his studios prioritized the immaterial and narrative structure of decommissioned and derelict objects and space and the tension between seemingly incompatible uses.